The new memory arrived in the mail right on time, and I could hardly wait to get one of the two new memory chips out and into the ELF2K to see if it would work with a new chip.
Of course, I had to wait, there are always things around the house that I need to do. But eventually I got a chance to head into the den and put the new RAM chip into the socket. Put it in, powered the ELF up, flipped the RUN switch up, and son of a gun the little computer worked on the first try.
Only I didn’t have a terminal hooked up yet. So I needed to download a terminal program (TerraTerm) and set it up (baud rate, port), hook up the serial cable (take the shield off the DB9 socket on the ELF, my serial-to-USB converter sucks), power everything up again – and it still worked.
I then spent a happy half an hour toggling programs into the ELF – starting with the one from page 66 of the March 1977 issue of Popular Electronics. That’s the one where when you flip the input switch once it turns the Q LED on, and when you flip the input switch again it turns the Q LED off. That’s the first program that I ran on my original ELF, and the one that I showed my Dad. I showed it to Katie – the nostalgia was thick in the air.
I’ll be playing with the ELF now from time to time, it’s a bit of nostalgia after all. I’m probably going to have to get the I/O expansion board so that I can hook it up to my Picaxe network, but that’s a project for next winter I think.